Degas was fascinated by ballerinas, observing them in rehearsal and performance as well as in his Paris studio. This somewhat introverted portrayal, left unfinished at the time of Degas’s death, tells us more about the artist’s process than the dancer. The bare preparation layer of her skirt and roughly sketched contours of her arms expose how he worked—laying in outlines first and then, working in sections, building half tones to model three-dimensional form. The resulting image is both strikingly modern and quite literally reserved: a work in progress.

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